[Oz] Animation programming in Oz

[Mikael Kindborg]

Hi!

My concrete question is how to do double-buffered
animation in Oz (using the Tk library I assume).
I have read the documentation but have not found
anything on this. What I want to do is to render
sprites into an off-screen image and then blit that
image to the display (to reduce flicker). I can not
see how to use the Image object or Canvas for this.

In addition, I would like to use sound (wave and midi).
Are there support for this from Oz?

The background is as follows. I am working on a project
(my PhD-project) where I study programming tools for
social agents. The user category is 10-12 year old children.
I experiment with the visual language of comics as a
representation for concurrent programs that use guarded
clauses. My work is similar in spirit to the work on
ToonTalk by Ken Kahn (http://www.toontalk.com).

At present I have an implementation working in Java, 
which I have tested with children in a 5:th grade class.

However, I feel that Oz would be interesting to experiment
with as an implementation language, for many reasons.

The interpreter I have written in Java is very simple, and
I would like to have more advanced language elements, like
logic variables. Implementing this is not trivial, and I
thought that I might compile the visual comic strip expressions
to Oz, or to write an interpreter in Oz. Any suggestions or
comments on this?

It would also be interesting to explore visual programming
environments for Oz. Not only for kids but also for adults,
for both programmers and non-programmers. In this case 
the visual representation would be tighter connected to Oz 
than in the kids language. But this is in the future for 
my part, right now I am focusing on the programming tool 
for the children.

This was a short background to my interest in Oz.

Any hints on animation in Oz, sound in Oz, and examples of
interpreters written in Oz, would be highly appreciated!

Best Regards,

Mikael Kindborg
Department of Computer Science (IDA)
Linköping University
Sweden
-
Please send submissions to users at mozart-oz.org
and administriva mail to users-request at mozart-oz.org.
The Mozart Oz web site is at http://www.mozart-oz.org/.